When in VBR mode, it does not. The current version of LAME has a bug that writes incorrect VBR headers

I thought it wrote no VBR headers at all. And that's where the problem started... to wit...

which makes many players drop the final mp3 frame

I thought that the "Drop final MP3 frame" was not a playback issue. But rather, people trying to correct the above thing (no VBR headers at all) were running VBRfix on their files, and that a bug in that program actually deleted the last MP3 frame.

The empeg player software also has a bug that introduces a gap, apparently when it sees a VBR header.

I thought that this wasn't the case. I thought that the problem was the above thing: VBRfix had a bug that deleted the last MP3 frame.

I could have sworn that the sequence of events I wrote was discoverd and reported by one of the empeg folk. I'd be interested if they could come in here and confirm or deny.